Continuing with the plan to get more work out there in places other than galleries, here’s some New Site Specific work made for a local coffee shop – smaller oil paintings made on raised stretchers, the walls in the shop are a really beautiful warm grey colour, hopefully they will be accepted, if so I’ll give them a shout out here :)

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I’ve finally managed to set up my own-hosted WordPress blog. That is… a WordPress blog on my own domain which gives me far more options than using WordPress.com. In my case it was necessary to do this because I want to try and sell my work online and a blog on WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to advertise and/or sell stuff.

I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t have a good idea of how everything fits together it’s not a particularly easy task… whatever anyone might tell you:), (especially if you’re not a natural techie:) But it’s like anything new.. There’s always a first time.

My advice would be to get as much general knowledge beforehand…Read up, Foundation Website Creation a downloadable text by Lane, Moscovitz, and Lewis is really helpful, or you could Google and so on. Also, ask around, friends and your online contacts – I found that bit quite hard:) It’s not always easy to admit you don’t understand something that everyone else seems to understand:) Take it from me they don’t all understand and anyway, it’s not all about that… it’s about where you are and where you want to get to. The really nice discovery for me was that online strangers were often quite willing to offer really good and usually helpful advice, sortta makes you feel a whole lot better about humanity.

There’s so many knowledgeable people out there so ask them about this do…. but what I learnt, very basically was:

If you want to move your old WordPress.com to your own domain.. First find a webhosting service that makes it easy. There’s loads to choose from, ask friends; what they use might be a good starting point. The one I used has a one click transfer, which sounded dead easy but required a bit of understanding too:). Then to start with: keep it simple, make a front page (There’s loads of choices of editor programs for doing this), again ask around, the page that is your front page should be named index.htm/html/xhtml/css/php (if you don’t know what xhtml, css and php are, stick with basic HTML to start with) …I made a big mistake with this at first and had to ask for more help. The index.htm/html/xhtml/css/php goes inside your domain root folder – if you want to use images you should make a directory for them too (which is just good housekeeping, they could all go in the root-folder, but you’d soon have millions of files there, a bit like that kitchen drawer…) and upload those separately….

My main problem was that I didn’t understand how the whole thing fitted together… The techie jargon is a bit daunting too. I sortta think I get it all, er…roughly :), now, but considering that a month ago I didn’t know anything much about all this apart from a vague idea, I’m not beating myself up too much. A friend did try and explain it all a year or so back but I didn’t really understand, got things a bit mixed up and all the information she gave me all at once actually confused me so much I almost got phobic about it! (Not her fault I hasten to add… I’m sure if I’d been more alert it would have made perfect sense ). I decided to link my first page to my blog only, but I suppose you could make links to lots of different places if you wanted to.. You don’t need to make more than that first page to start with. Alternatively, You can make the the front page on your blog your domain’s front page, but I didn’t as I wasn’t quite sure where to put the files in the root directory.

Then all you gotta do is remember to pay the hosting bill:)

Heartfelt thanks for online handholding go to: Jonas Anderson (Swedish blogger extrordinaire and co-writer of Sweden’s best blogging online journal) and Ivan Pope (In my opinion one of the very best UK art blogs around.) Also, much thanks to other kind people on Twitter.com who offered help and ideas and not least to everyone who has commented here these past weeks, it’s been really appreciated I can tell ya :) And please feel free to leave any further comments you think might be of help to me and to others, thanks.

So all I have do now is get going… Will post link to the new place here when I’m done with the final tidying.